Theatre review: Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy

It's been a summer of rewriting and reinterpreting the House of Atreus, and after Simon Stone gave us a version so loose it was unrecognisable, and Benedict Andrews a comparatively faithful one that took an abrupt turn into a different story altogether, Ava Pickett decides the only way left to take the story is Essex. Bloodsport Colon After Helen of Troy takes us to the part of the return from the Trojan War that doesn't get looked at much by the original Greek Tragedies: What happened when the woman an army spent a decade trying to bring home actually got there, and what did she think about that homecoming anyway? Helen (Michelle Dockery) was never abducted; she just met a charming and handsome foreign man called Paris in the pub, and realised that the life she'd been living wasn't the only option available to her.

Theatre review: 1536

Anne Boleyn looms large over Ava Pickett's 1536, although she never actually makes an appearance*: Instead we're in a field in Essex with three regular young women, who we catch up with over the course of a few weeks as gossip reaches them of the queen's arrest for treason, increasingly lurid accusations of sexual impropriety, and eventually her execution. In the process we see them deal with the slow, horrifying realisation of just how precarious their lives are as women in Tudor England. Central to the story is Anna (Siena Kelly,) whose outlook on her own body and sexuality is very modern - she enjoys her power over men as much if not more so than the actual sex, doesn't particularly care if she's got a reputation in the village, and is currently hooking up with Richard (Adam Hugill,) even when she discovers he's about to enter into an arranged marriage with her best friend Jane (Liv Hill.)